Weapons of Mass Distraction

This guy is definitely pissed about Digital Rights Management (DRM). He should be, this whole concept of licenses only allowing music to be played on specific devices/programs is ridiculous.

I read it out loud and even Keyron was even pissed about it. You see he got bit by the Sony rootkit a few years back. And it took me a good amount of time to clean that crap off his computer.

But I’ve reluctantly agreed to DRM since I’ve bought a ton of tune from the iTunes store. Oh sure, there’s a kludge to get the tracks into MP3 format. Burn them to CD and rip the CD. And there’s software that does it so you don’t have to waste the 50 cents on the CD.

The music and video industry need a wakeup call. Granted, they learned this bullshit from computer software vendors. Have you ever actually read your license agreement for Windows? It’s filled with legalese that essentially says that you are using the software that you paid for under the good graces of the vendor, and should the vendor wish to arbitrarily disable your license, they have every right to do so.

I realized they’re trying to protect an investment, but there has to be a better way. Maybe the first step is charging a more reasonable price per track. A track is ‘only 99 cents, but then I look in my iTunes library and see that in the last 6 months I’ve spent $200 on music. That’s $33 a month! I know a proposal had been floated around that would have charged broadband subscribers an extra $5 a month but they could legally download all the music they wanted. I would have gone for that.

Put it this way, average CD has what, 12 tracks on it? And they charge what, $12-$17 for the CD now? About a buck a track on average. But think about the overhead involved. They need the raw materials for the CD and it’s casing and labeling. They need the energy to press the CD’s, and they need to pay the people to produce the discs.

But with digital, it’s recorded, mastered, and then flipped online and they start ringing up a buck a track. Except the overhead doesn’t support a buck a track, maybe 25 cents a track would be more like it.

We get fucked no matter what we do. It’s time to break the power of big corporations. They never deserved the rights they claim anyhow, it was just some asshole clerk in the 1800’s who inserted language asserting that corporations were the same as people when it came to the Constitution. We all know that’s false, don’t we?